Apple’s fight with the FBI is just heating up.
On Thursday, dozens of the tech industry’s most influential companies will file court briefs backing Apple in the case involving the iPhone used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter are among the names of companies expected to voice their support for Apple’s stance that it shouldn’t be forced by the Department of Justice to hack the iPhone’s encryption.
We’ll be updating this story with more information as companies file their briefs supporting Apple throughout the day.
SEE ALSO: FBI director asks, ‘What if Apple engineers are kidnapped and forced to write code?’
Seven leading experts say the FBI’s request would weaken the iPhone’s security and create a tool that hackers and foreign government’s could easily exploit.
Seven of the world’s top security, forensics, and cryptology experts (one of whom has worked for the NSA) filed a brief saying they’re “strongly opposed” to the court’s order that Apple help the FBI break into the contents of Farook’s government-owned iPhone 5c.
The experts argue that the FBI’s demand for a back door “endangers public safety.”
“For practical reasons, the security bypass this Court would order Apple to create almost certainly will be used on other iPhones in the future,” the brief reads. “This spread increases the risk that the forensic software will escape Apple’s control either through theft, embezzlement, or order of another court, including a foreign government. If that happens, the custom code could be used by criminals and governments to extract sensitive personal and business data from seized, lost, or stolen iPhones, or it could be reverse engineered, giving attackers a stepping stone on the path towards their goal of defeating Apple’s passcode security.”
You can read a PDF of the full brief here.
Twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, and others say the FBI’s request of Apple has “no legal basis” and “threatens the core principles of privacy, security, and transparency that
underlie the fabric of the Internet.”
In a “friend of the court” brief filed on Thursday, 16 major tech companies collectively backed Apple.
Names of companies in the brief include Twitter, Square, Reddit, Airbnb, GitHub, Medium, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, and Squarespace.
“The government in this case has invoked a centuries-old statute, the All Writs Act, to force Apple, Inc. to develop software to undermine its own carefully constructed security measures, which were designed to protect its customers’ data from hacking, misuse, and theft,” the brief reads. “This extraordinary and unprecedented effort to compel a private company to become the government’s investigative arm not only has no legal basis under the All Writs Act or any other law, but threatens the core principles of privacy, security, and transparency that underlie the fabric of the Internet.”
You can read the brief in its entirety here.
Like Apple, AT&T wants Congress to decide on the encryption debate.
“This case involves two interests that all Americans share: keeping our citizens safe and protecting our personal privacy,” the carrier said in a court brief. “As a company committed to both, the critical issue to AT&T is whether those interests will be balanced on an ad hoc basis by judges presiding over individual cases or by Congress providing a clear, uniform legal framework for all participants in the new digital economy. We felt it important to add our voice to this conversation because we believe that, as a matter of law and policy, Congress is the right body to decide this balance.”
See the rest of the story at Tech Insider
The tech world rallies behind Apple in encryption fight with FBI
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